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Edward paused outside the door to the captain’s cabin to stamp the last of the ice off his boots. The door was open. He was accustomed by now to the captain’s habits; no need to knock if it was. He could hear murmured conversation, though he tried not to listen in; the captain and his steward discussing dinner or some such, no doubt. But they must have heard him stamping his boots, for when he entered, he found Crozier seated at the table with an expectant look on his face and Jopson fussing over the tea service in the background. 

“News from Erebus?” Crozier raised an eyebrow at Edward. They’d seen her slow and the flags go up, and they’d been holding their position while they waited for news. 

Edward ducked his head in assent. “Their propeller, sir. It’s jammed.” 

Crozier sighed. “Ah.” He set down his glass with a clink and turned halfway in his seat. Jopson glanced over his shoulder in the same moment and met Crozier’s eye. “Jopson?” But Jopson shook his head. “No? Not inclined to offer our sister ship some assistance?” 

Jopson turned to face his captain, hands clasped behind his back and eyes on the floor. “Too cold, sir.” 

“Ah.” Crozier turned back to Edward. “Well, then. Send them my regards. They’ll need it, with that damned diving suit.” He drank the rest of the whiskey in his glass in a single swallow. 

Edward, unsure if that was an actual order, simply bowed his head with a “Sir.” But as he turned to leave, he glanced at Jopson. Jopson was looking back, his eyes shadowed under dark lashes. There was something pleading in his expression, a silent request that Edward not share what had just transpired with the rest of the ship. Edward, puzzled, simply gave him a strained smile and left—but as he heard the door close behind him, and then the murmured voices resume, he had time to wonder at the conversation he had just borne witness to—an exchange that, on its surface, was entirely incomprehensible. For a steward, surely, would not be asked to go to another ship to do a seaman’s task, even less so when it was cold enough to make metal burn to the touch; and certainly could not be of any assistance when the issue lay not at the bottom of the captain’s washbasin, but in the depths of a dark, unforgiving ocean.

“Lieutenant Little.” 

Edward turned. He was in his slops, waiting for the rest of the party to travel with him to Erebus. The captain was making these requests more often of late. The constant trips were beginning to wear on the men. He was debating not asking them to accompany him next time, though it was squarely against both the orders of their former commander (now safe at the bottom of his ice hole, no doubt) and common sense. They had not seen the bear (if that was what it was, the dark corners of his mind whispered) in months. 

Yet it was not fear that tightened his throat at the sight of Jopson approaching, his eyes bright and his steps light. “I was hoping to catch you before you went across. Are you leaving soon, sir?” 

Edward nodded shortly. He was often tongue-tied around the steward. He shouldn’t have been; Edward was first lieutenant, and the captain’s steward was well below him in rank. It didn’t do for an officer to be unable to speak to his men. 

But Jopson, he felt in more ways than one, wasn’t one of his men. 

“I’ll keep it short, then.” Jopson dug around in the pocket of his coat. His forelock flopped in front of his eyes as he did so, and he absently flicked it aside with a toss of his head. Edward’s fingers curled, his nails digging into the wool of his gloves. Jopson kept his hair so neat; it looked as smooth as a raven’s wing. 

“There we are.” Jopson had found what he was looking for: a scrimshaw letter opener, by the looks of it. He held it out, blade first. Edward awkwardly took it by the midpoint between tip and handle. As he did so, Jopson’s hand slid forward and their fingers brushed. Jopson’s skin was cool and smooth. 

Edward quickly drew his hand back, letter opener now in his possession. His heart pounded in his chest. Jopson dropped his hand as though he hadn’t noticed. 

“Could you please give that to Doctor Stanley, sir? He has something for me, I believe.” A smile that made Jopson’s eyes crinkle at the corners. Edward’s own mouth lifted faintly in response. “I’d go myself, but...” 

“Of course.” 

Edward ran his thumb over the handle of the letter opener. It was whalebone, he guessed, from the heft of it; and he could feel a detailed engraving along the length of it. 

“Many thanks, Lieutenant.” 

“Edward,” he said. The word surprised both of them; but now that it was out of his mouth, Edward could not take it back. “Call me Edward. Please.” 

This smile rivalled the one before it. “Thank you, Edward, then.” 

When he’d gone, Edward turned the handle in the light from the skylight. He went very still. The engraving was not, as he had thought at first, of a mermaid. Its tail was too long, even allowing for the flights of fancy and artistic expression of a bored whaler. It looped over and over down the handle before it split into two tails, each with fins that ended in rows of spikes. And the face of it—if it could be called a face. Teeth, like needles, in a gaping maw so wide it nearly hid a pair of beady black eyes.

Edward nearly forgot his second errand after his visit to Fitzjames. He was at the ladder when he thought to ask. “Oh—could I see Doctor Stanley?” 

Hoar gazed at him with a blank expression, then nodded. He bent his head—Hoar was very tall—and ducked through the doorway. Edward followed him. The path was oddly familiar; the layout of the ship was the same as Terror, only its inverse. 

Stanley’s eyebrows rose at the sight of Edward at the entrance to his surgery. “Lieutenant,” he said, setting down some instrument that he had been cleaning. “What a surprise. What can I do for you?” 

“Doctor Stanley,” he said politely. “Jopson—the captain’s steward said to give this to you.” He held out the letter opener. He was glad to be rid of it, though a strange part of him clung to it; Jopson’s hands had touched it, after all. But holding it made his palms prickle with clammy sweat. 

Stanley took it with two hands. He looked down at it, his expression perfectly unreadable. 

Edward cleared his throat awkwardly; he had not spoken to the doctor outside of command meetings. “I shall just—” Edward turned to leave. 

“Aren’t you going to wait?” 

Edward hesitated. “For what?” 

Stanley gave him a hard look. Without another word, he went to a cabinet—though not before, Edward noticed, he carefully placed the letter opener on his desk. After a few moments, he emerged with a small glass jar. 

“It must be applied to any dry spots immediately,” he said as he handed it over. “It’s a preventative, not a cure-all.” 

Edward turned the jar in his hand. It had no label, and the glass was tinted brown, so it was impossible to see inside. But it felt heavy in his hand. “Balm?” he hazarded. 

Stanley nodded once, sharply. His nostrils were flared as if he found the very idea of being in a lieutenant’s presence distasteful. “From seaweed. My own recipe, if you must know.” He turned away and wiped his hands on a towel, a clear dismissal. “Tell him to use it judiciously. That’s the last of it.”

“...and two barrels of brine.” 

“Brine?” Edward cut in. He had been drifting during the routine inventory, but that caught his attention. 

Irving looked at him, then Crozier, but before he could respond, Crozier waved a hand. “Yes, brine, Edward. We can’t very well keep our fire holes going to draw it up in these conditions, can we?” 

As if to punctuate his words, the wind howled outside. It tossed snow against the cabin’s windows, then changed direction and whistled like a scream through some crack the caulkers had missed. 

“Carry on,” Crozier said to Irving, who did as he was told. 

All the others in the meeting replaced their expressions of mild attentiveness as though this were nothing unusual. Even Fitzjames seemed untroubled by the mention of such an odd addition to their stores. 

Edward had never heard of a ship taking on brine on purpose. All manner of brined and pickled foods, of course; but they had not seen fresh meat nor veg since they’d left Beechey. They had nothing new to preserve. He could think of no reason why they would need to draw up seawater, let alone store it on board. They were ice locked, which itself gave them all the fresh water they could need. 

The meeting concluded while Edward was still occupied with his thoughts. The chairs scraping against the floorboards roused him, and he rose belatedly. A warm voice at his ear—Jopson. “May I take your cup, sir?” 

“Of course,” Edward said, caught off-guard. He tried to step back to allow the steward space, but this only bumped him against the steward’s chest, jostling him. He looked at the man, horrified at his own clumsiness; but Jopson only smiled at him, a knowing twinkle in his eye, and reached around him to pluck the cup from where it sat on the table. 

Edward, a familiar heat rising in him, hastily followed the others from the cabin. He was not unfamiliar with this temptation, nor the rumoured proclivities of stewards; but he knew well where the line of impropriety was for an officer, and he dared not even tread close to it.

There was something unreal about Thomas Jopson. 

It took Edward some time to notice, and even longer to realise he wasn’t the only one who had. The other men steered clear of Jopson. Edward thought it was simply to do with his station, at first; Jopson was a steward, and therefore beneath their notice. Or perhaps it was more on Jopson’s side than the men’s; he had a particular skill at existing in a room without making himself seen, as Edward had observed during more than one command meeting. 

But then he began to notice a certain tension that would come over some men when Jopson was near. Conversation would tend towards nervous laughter as he approached, then die out. Edward mulled over this on more than one occasion during the long, tedious process of muster; he would much rather be examining Jopson’s fine, neat nails for dirt than those of the men before him. Then such a thought would make him flush with heat, and he’d become unnecessarily brusque with the man before him, and then feel even worse for it. So he was inclined to think that it was Jopson’s almost unnatural beauty that caused such discomfort among the men, and that there were more men on the ship with his own inclinations than he had previously suspected. 

But Jopson’s strange beauty was alluring. A kind of siren song. Edward played a game with himself, at times; how much of Jopson could he see without directly looking at him? During command meetings, especially, this kept him occupied; Jopson’s fine white hands (softened, no doubt, by that balm he’d procured for him) as he poured him a cup of tea, at which Edward murmured an absent thanks; the blue shadow on the side of his clean-shaven jaw, seen out of the corner of his eye as he listened to Crozier speak; the neat line of shirt collar (always perfectly pressed) at his throat as he tended to the tea service. 

The moments when he caught Jopson’s eye, always by accident, were a shock of ice water. It was a strangely piercing, dangerous gaze on a man who could make himself melt into the wallpaper at a moment’s notice. But Jopson always looked back at Edward unflinchingly. Edward’s own expression, which surely must have been one of shock or alarm, never seemed to unsettle him. Each time, Jopson seemed to see something in Edward that caused his gaze to soften—and sometimes, he even went so far as to give him a small, secret smile.

Weighed down by dread, Edward raised his hand to rap on the door of Captain Crozier’s cabin. Another report from Erebus, another unfortunate count of their whiskey stores. There were light voices coming from inside, recognizable by tone and timbre as the captain’s and Jopson’s—not unusual, yet something made him pause before knuckles met wood. He listened: the captain’s footsteps, heavy on the wooden floorboards. And something else, a sound that was familiar yet caught on the edges of his mind like a burr on a glove. The sound came again: a splashing, as though someone were bathing.  

Edward withdrew his hand without knocking. Footsteps, splashing; it was not the captain who was bathing. He retreated, keeping his steps as quiet as possible. 

Perhaps it was only in his imagination that he heard a gasp, as though in pleasure. And then laughter, light and low.

This command meeting was noticeably more subdued. Even Jopson seemed more tense. His fingers even fiddled with the cuff of his shirt in an uncharacteristic show of nerves. 

“I don’t know how to say it any better, sir,” Irving said in a low voice. “The men are restless.” 

“Restlessness be damned,” Crozier said vehemently. “They cannot catch our mood from us. None of what we say is to leave this room, in manner or word, do you hear?” They nodded, mute. “And if you hear any more talk, no matter how small or insignificant it might seem to you—”

They all went quiet. A woman’s voice, low and carrying. “Singing,” said Crozier. He turned to Jopson. “Is it...?” A slight shake of Jopson’s head. Crozier nodded and relaxed. He turned back to the others. “Right. Edward, keep a close eye on the men tonight; I’ll have no more excursions.” 

“Sir.” 

But Edward’s eyes were drawn to Jopson. Singing, the captain had said. To his shock, Jopson was looking right back at him. Jopson smiled, just slightly, but this one felt like a razor blade pressed against Edward’s skin. A warning. 

He swallowed, ducked his head, left the room with the others in a scrape of chairs and melancholy; but he felt Jopson’s gaze on his shoulders, even when he was well out of sight.

“Jopson,” Edward said quietly. It was dinner for the men, and Jopson was scarfing down a can of food. He’d meant to tell Jopson that he should sit with the others, and Edward would attend to the captain if he ran the bell—but Jopson quickly swallowed as he turned to him and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. 

Red. Blood, Edward thought at first; then reason struggled to the surface of his mind and insisted it must be a stray bit of tomato caught on Jopson’s lip. But no tinned tomato had ever kept its colour so well. 

“Sir?” Jopson was looking at him. Edward averted his eyes in shame; he’d been staring at Jopson’s mouth. 

“You have something...” Edward drew a line over the corner of his own mouth to illustrate. His eyes flicked up to Jopson. He watched as Jopson pressed a thumb to his own lip; examined it when it came away shining red; and then licked the blood from it. He swiped his tongue over his lips, leaving them pink and moist. 

Jopson looked at Edward and cocked his head curiously. Gone? Edward nodded once. 

Jopson returned to his veal cutlet tomato as though nothing had happened. Now that Jopson’s attention was occupied elsewhere, Edward felt free to look his fill. Jopson had been less put-together of late. His hair was slightly dishevelled and had lost some of its shine. His clothes seemed more threadbare; less time to mend them, perhaps? But now that he was looking for it, he saw signs that went beyond those of a man busy with duties no one hoped to be required to render to their captain: a grey pallor to his cheeks, a thinness to the skin under his eyes that left it almost translucent. 

“Your lips are chapped.” 

Jopson glanced at him and nodded, his mouth once again full. 

Edward was about to ask if he needed more of the balm from Stanley—but then, remembering it had run out, he was going to ask if there was something he could do; but then the bell clanged above their heads. Jopson glanced at it even as he gulped down a final mouthful. He dropped the can in the crate they used for the discarded ones, and a moment later he was gone. 

Edward ran a thumb over his own lips absently. Why was it that most of the men, who were in the biting cold as often as not, only suffered from lips that were a little dry at best, while Jopson’s skin was as dry and cracked as if he’d stood in the arctic wind for hours?

As Edward left his own cabin, he found himself lingering outside the captain’s door. If he listened very closely, he could hear Jopson’s voice. 

The lap of water—not from a bathtub, this time, but a damp cloth stirred in a bowl. Then Jopson’s voice, soft: “I don’t like to hear a woman singing, sir.”

The bell was silent. Jopson was not about; he must be tending to the captain. Edward had not been summoned. There was no reason for him to visit the captain, and indeed, he had avoided his berth of late; he was grateful that Jopson’s constant care for him rendered visits unnecessary. He felt relief every time he did not have to see the captain in that state. 

And yet. He found himself, again, at the door to the captain’s quarters. 

The door was not ajar; it was closed. Yet he opened it quietly, without noise. He did not speak, or knock to announce himself. He stepped inside. 

He prepared, in his head, what he might say. The excuses for why he was in his captain’s own cabin; a place he had every right to be, especially as acting captain. But none of them were needed. 

There was a light burning in the captain’s berth. He stepped forward, and again, on silent feet, until he could just see inside. The back of Jopson’s head, his shirtsleeves, his waistcoat, all turned soft and dreamlike by the lamplight. He was singing softly to the captain. Edward was distantly surprised that he had not heard his voice until now; his voice was clear, yet somehow quiet. He found himself leaning forward to listen. If he could hear the words... 

He became aware that Jopson was moving slowly, up and down, as though upon a slowly trotting horse. There was a squeaking, as of wood being shifted minutely, repeatedly. And a grunt from the captain, almost a sigh. 

Edward nearly stumbled over his own feet in his hurry to leave the room. That haunting singing followed him—as did the sight of the captain’s face, slack, though creased slightly as if in pain or pleasure, as Jopson squeezed every last drop out of him.

A memory came to Edward, though he was no longer sure if it was real or a fiction conjured by a mind too long left in this cold and dreary place. He recalled stepping into the captain’s quarters when the door was ajar. A lamp burned on a table, but the captain was not there. Instead, Jopson’s stood with his back to the door. A bowl sat beside him. He dipped a cloth in the bowl—for that was the sound of lapping water Edward had heard before he stepped inside—and drew it across the back of his bent neck. The cloth caught on his dark hair, ruffling it; and as he drew the cloth away, it left behind a trail of iridescent scales—green, though orange-tipped where they caught the light of the lamp, and blue and purple where they dipped into shadow. 

Jopson raised his head and turned. Edward stood, frozen; he was powerless to move as Jopson smiled, slow and amused. A close-lipped smile, and yet Edward was sure there were pin-like teeth behind it. He had seen those teeth on a terrible fish of the deep that Goodsir had captured and thrown, still flopping, onto the deck. They had all backed away from it in pity and horror. But as it died, Edward had felt only fear: for he was sure that had he been in the ocean, and not safe on the deck of a ship, that creature would have ripped his throat out as easily as cutting through butter.

The wind howled across the desolate shale. Edward sat in his tent, his fist to his mouth. He had the terrible feeling that if he dropped his hand, an inhuman sound would come out of him and he would be powerless to stop it. 

Crozier had been gone for days—perhaps three. Time was difficult to track. Edward had expected something from the mutineers by now, some ransom or attack, but they seemed to have vanished. The first day after, they had found Hodgson wandering on the shale—a welcome reunion, for Edward in particular, but a poor consolation for the loss of their captain. 

They had lost another two men since. It was not in Edward as much as in some, but he could not remember when he hadn’t been chilled to the bone. 

Steps on the shale outside. They should have been familiar, but Edward was losing the ability to distinguish the footfalls of his fellows. A confident hand pushed open the flap and a blond head ducked under the tent poles. 

“I thought I’d find you here.” Hodgson’s tone was light, but it lacked his usual good humour. 

Edward dropped the fist from his mouth. “George,” he said. His voice was raspy from disuse, but he heard with relief that it sounded nearly normal to his ears. 

Hodgson crouched beside him. The motion was unusually spry. Edward’s own knees hurt just to watch. “Edward,” he said, and what little humour was left in him drained from his face. His face was pinched in a way that pained Edward to see. “I’m afraid I must ask something of you.” 

Edward swallowed what little spittle could be found in his dry mouth. His heart pounded terribly in his chest, as though it were trying to break free; he had dreaded the moment when one of the men would ask his permission to take that terrible, last resort of survival. “Ask.” 

“It’s about Jopson.” Edward’s heart, traitorously, lightened. But then the quietness of Hodgson’s voice pierced his veil of calm. Hodgson lowered his voice further. “We have tried to...keep it from the rest of the men. Contain it. But we are near our limit. I’m afraid we cannot continue like this.” 

Edward’s forehead furrowed. None of this meant anything to him. It could not be that Jopson was on the verge of death; he was one of the few who could still stand upright. He had taken to helping Bridgens in the sick tent. A poor replacement for Goodsir, but something. “Who is ‘we’?” 

Hodgson looked at him as though he had spoken nonsense. “Those of us who can stand, of course. Well, among the officers, petty and warrant, or what’s left of us; we’ve tried to keep it from the rest, as I said.” He paused, licked his lips. “I’m sorry, I thought you knew. I’ll admit I didn’t want to burden you either, as...” He trailed off, seeming unable to say it. None of them wanted to acknowledge that Edward was now acting captain, least of all Edward himself.  

“And Jopson is...?” Edward struggled to capture the thread of Hodgson’s words. 

Hodgson’s throat worked. With two fingers, he pulled the collar of his shirt towards his shoulder. He turned his head away from Edward; and there, upon the soft skin where neck met shoulder, Edward saw two oozing, red wounds. 

Hodgson dropped his hand. With a tug on the hem of his shirt, the fabric slid back into place. Edward’s head spun. “Please, Edward,” Hodgson whispered. His eyes were clouded with grief. “He is draining the rest of us dry.”

Edward stepped into Jopson’s tent. 

Jopson looked up at him with a smile. His bearded face was so unlike the clean-shaven steward Edward remembered as to be almost unrecognisable. There was a feverish gleam to his eyes. The skin on his face was yellowed, and his lips were chapped beyond recognition. Yet he was otherwise hale and hearty. 

“Sir, it’s a pleasure to see you,” Jopson said. He didn’t rise, though in truth there was not much space to do so. The tent had been shoddily erected, or else half collapsed as many tents in the camp had; and the only place a man of Jopson’s height would have been able to stand upright was at the exact place where the tent poles met. Edward, ill at ease, remained standing with a bowed head and hunched shoulders.  

“Thomas,” he said with forced levity, and then immediately regretted the informality. He didn’t think he could bear to hear Jopson call him “Edward” now. “How are you?” 

Jopson’s smile took on a patronising edge. “You can see for yourself, I think.” 

“I spoke to Hodgson.” Jopson’s smile immediately sharpened. Edward swallowed. “That is, he—he spoke to me.” 

Jopson tilted his head slightly. “What about, sir?” 

Edward breathed a little easier at the formality. “About—I understand you—y-your diet is different from—” 

Jopson stood. Edward closed his eyes tightly. They were nearly nose to nose. “From yours, yes,” Jopson murmured. The breath of his words ruffled Edward’s hair. “But I’ve admired how devoted you are to keeping every one of us alive.” 

Edward was sinking into a morass. Any idea he might put a stop to this became impossible to hold in his mind. In fact, going forward with it seemed inevitable. “I’d ask you spare them,” he made himself say, his eyes still shut. With fumbling fingers, he worked at the top button of his coat. 

Jopson laughed, a foreign sound out here on the shale. Edward looked at him, numb and uncomprehending. He licked at his lips to moisten them. “George showed me... I thought my neck...” 

A cool hand covered his. Jopson drew his hand away and clasped it between his. “Oh, that. That’s only one way.” His smile was almost kind. “What do you know of my condition, sir?” 

“I—” He knew nothing. Fragments, each a suspicion without certainty. 

“I’ll show you, shall I, sir?” 

Edward looked down in horror at their clasped hands. The sensation of Jopson’s skin against his own was changing. Smooth, still, but no longer soft. No longer cool, but cold. Scales blossomed across Jopson’s skin, winking in iridescent greens and purples more vibrant than any bruise. Those fine, neatly trimmed nails were now the sharp talons of a predator. 

Edward struggled to withdraw his hand, but the grip tightened and he could not. He looked up. Jopson’s face was familiar to him, but at his collarbone where his shirt lay open, scales advanced like the oncoming tide. 

Edward broke away with a gasp. Jopson’s smile was bitter now; he had released his hold on Edward. The scales had stopped advancing. “I think,” he said in a low voice, “it is a terrible thing to ask a man to hide who he is when he is among his fellows. But even worse, I’ve found, is when the words are never spoken; and it is not an ask, but a demand, and if you do not pretend to be someone you are not, they will cut you down for it.” The scales began to recede. Jopson’s smile was sad. “Haven’t you found that to be true, Edward?” 

Edward’s blood went cold. His tendencies, of course, he had not kept hidden very well, not from Jopson; of course they had recognized something in kind in one another. But the implications of this slipped out of his mind even as he tried to grasp his thoughts, and he landed on the next closest one. 

“Why could you not swim for help?” His voice cracked. He was beyond reason; beyond confining himself to the reason of an Englishman. If Crozier had had such a man in his employ, and yet not thought of such a simple solution—

Jopson’s smile split his face terribly. It stretched his cracked lips to bleeding. “Swim? If you all can barely manage in the freezing air, do you suppose I’d fare any better, for miles upon miles? Do you think the Thames compares to these waters, even in midwinter?” Edward swallowed; he had some idea it couldn’t be as cold as that, because the ocean was not frozen through. Then again, he could not swim at all, and had to admit his ignorance of such matters. But he did not have time to voice these thoughts, because what Jopson said next froze him to the bone: “And just as we are not the only people in this forsaken land, do you suppose I would be alone beneath the waves?” 

“There are more?” He meant to say ‘of you,’ but cut these words off at the last instant. Of course Jopson was not the only of his kind; he had heard the stories. Thought them all sailors’ tales, but heard them. Creatures with tails like fish; creatures who could sing a song so beautiful, all would go still to listen to it. When they dragged sailors into the waves, the sailors would go happily to their deaths. 

The stories that some of them were permitted to serve on ships, as long as they never revealed their true natures to their fellows. 

“Oh, I’ve heard them,” Jopson said with feverish certainty, unaware of Edward’s inner turmoil. “They sing to each other beneath the waves, much as we do. Not in a song I can understand;  I’m not the only one who’s heard them, I think.” He turned his unearthly eyes on Edward then. Edward thought, unbidden, of the night when David Young moaned and wailed as he died, and the frantic shriek he gave at the last. Edward squeezed his eyes shut and turned his head away, both from Jopson and the memory. 

“So it’s fear that’s kept you from the waves,” Edward said dully. “Fear of being killed, just like us.” A fool’s fear. A fear that had torn the men asunder, into those who believed Hickey’s story and those who didn’t, and brought them to where they were now: spread across the shale like so many tattered strips of sailcloth. 

“You have it all wrong.” A cold hand touched Edward’s cheek. He let that hand turn his face. Jopson’s eyes were so pale. In the dark of the tent, they almost seemed to glow. “Loyalty is what has kept me here.” 

Edward’s stomach dropped. Not to the ship’s company he knew, but to their captain. “You’ll end this, then,” he said dully, but he knew as he said it that the words were false. 

Jopson smiled, almost sweetly. “End this? No. I will be alive when the captain returns. That is the least I can do after all he has done for me.” 

All he has done for me. Edward felt ill. “And so without him, you feed on us.” 

Jopson hummed. Again, Edward raised his hand to his neck, but it was an aborted motion; he let it fall. “You said there was another way.” 

Jopson licked his lips. “What do you know of the effects of scurvy, sir?” 

Edward did not understand what was being asked of him. What he had thought he knew, versus what he now knew, were like night and day. That scurvy could kill, yes, he had known that; but that was a poor way to describe men’s teeth falling from their mouths as bruises bloomed across their insides like ink on paper. 

Jopson captured Edward’s hand between his smooth, cool palms. Edward let him. That hand drew his own lower, below his belt. Edward’s breath hitched as his own hand made contact with his own crotch. His flesh prickled as it stirred; not enough to rise, but enough to make itself known. “This is one thing it has taken from many of the men,” Jopson said sadly. He pressed more firmly; the pressure was now almost painful. “But I would wager you haven’t, have you, sir?” His voice turned into nearly a moan. “Not you.” 

Edward’s flesh responded. Even as he began to fill, the fine hairs on the back of his neck rose; a shiver came over him. Jopson’s hand slipped past his own and rubbed firmly along his shaft through his trousers. Edward’s eyes fluttered shut, both in horror and pleasure; he choked back a sound that might have been a moan. He could not watch as Jopson’s fingers, quick though not quite as nimble as they used to be, unlaced his trousers and slipped inside. Cool skin gripped hot flesh; Edward jerked. A sharp nail dug briefly into the slit at the top; Edward cried out, though he broke off the sound before it could leave his throat. The pad of a thumb smoothed over the liquid that leaked through the slit, as if in apology. 

Edward opened his eyes. “What do you want from me?” he rasped. 

Jopson smiled. “Only what you have to give.” 

Jopson seemed to have no trouble going to his knees on the thin blanket that made the floor of his tent. He put his mouth on Edward, and at first Edward feared he would feel teeth, and he feebly twitched at the thought; but it was a familiar heat of tongue and palate. Jopson swallowed him down; and down; and Edward felt his crisis approach, and crest, and break; but it simply never stopped, an endless wave of sensation as he spent into the heat of Jopson’s throat. All wavered in heat and white light. It felt as though Jopson had hooked into the core of him and would pull his essence from his body down to the last drop. 

Jopson sat back on his heels, licking his lips with a long, pink tongue. Edward’s vision was hazy and spotted with dark spots; he swayed on his feet. He was dimly aware that his member was limp and cold where it hung from his open flies. 

Jopson braced himself with hands on his thighs and stood. Edward was shivering, he came to be aware. His face in particular was very cold, colder even than the rest of him. Jopson took him by the shoulders and leaned in as if for a kiss on the cheek, in the continental manner of greeting; but instead he licked a hot stripe up Edward’s wet cheek. Edward shuddered, though from an emotion or merely the sensation he did not know, and he closed his eyes against the sight before him. More tears leaked from his eyes, and Jopson licked them up until no more came. 

Edward fell to his knees. The dark spots were gone; his vision was going white. He knew now that what Jopson had done to him was a kindness; had he pierced his flesh the way he had with Hodgson, the wound would never heal. He wondered if Jopson had lapped at the blood slowly leaking from Hodgson’s wound, an almost absent gesture; or whether he had taken to it with a strong hand on the back of Hodgson’s head, like nursing milk from a breast that otherwise would go to waste. A kindness to both child and mother. 

Edward wept in dry, silent sobs. The last of his tears had gone. Soon, he would not be able to cry at all for lack of water; even snow to melt was hard to come by. One of the terrors of an arctic summer. 

“Shush, now,” Jopson murmured. He mouthed at Edward’s jaw, licking sweat from his skin. Edward, hands limp at his sides, let him. He let him, too, push Edward to the thin blanket Jopson had laid out over the shale; let Jopson stroke him again to a semblance of hardness. When Jopson sank down onto him, it was a heat like none Edward had experienced. He groaned, a terrible, inhuman sound pulled from his throat, and grasped at Jopson’s waist. Jopson covered his hands with his own. He could feel the slide of scales over his skin. Jopson threw his head back, exposing a long throat, and began to move. 

Edward knew with a certainty that when he could no longer rise, when the scurvy was in him so deep that this last use he could give to Jopson was gone, then the sharp pricks he now felt at the base of his member would sharpen, and drive deep; and at the last, with the heat of the salt in his blood, he would serve something greater than himself. 

Perhaps then, he thought as he closed his eyes, the captain would come.